It is a political season, so I’ll venture to make a non-partisan analogy. In some ways, companies’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are like representative in Congress. We want everyone to work together, but when it comes to making compromises, we don’t want our own representative to yield. Every couple of years, just when cooperation starts to seep into the system, a new batch of representatives with new priorities and positions joins the mix. Executives want transparency across the enterprise, but the data is locked in multiple ERP systems, making it difficult to match or even find the information needed for sound analysis. Getting to a single version of the truth is one of the primary reasons companies decide to take on painful ERP consolidation projects. In almost every case,…